Sharpes Siege   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

A French officer, galloping his horse across the esplanade to seewhy the attack had faltered, was seen by two riflemen frorn the south-western bastion. They both fired. Man and horse shuddered, blood spat to sand, then the wounded horse, screaming and tossing, dragged its dead master in a great circle towards the column’s rear.

“Fire!” Frederickson shouted and more heavy bullets tore into the smoke and drove the column further back. The drums hesitated, a single rattle sounded defiance, then was silent.

“Hold your fire! Hold it!” Sharpe could see the enemy going, running, and though he wished he could have fired till the last enemy was out of sight, he had ammunition to conserve. “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” He felt the wild elation of a battle won, of an enemy broken. The space before the fort’s gate was foul with dead and wounded men, and smeared with a great, white smudge of lime that was mixed with blood. “Cease firing!”

At which point Calvet’s real attack burst on to the north-western corner of the Teste de Buch.

Black clouds were coming from the north. Captain Palmer had watched them, had seen the grey blur of rain beneath them and judged that by this night the Teste de Buch would once again be crouching beneath dirty weather. Biscay, he thought, was living up to its reputation for sudden storms and uneasy calms.

Then the attack had struck at the fort’s gate.

Men on the northern rampart turned to watch. It seemed to them that a cauldron boiled around the gate, a cauldron that billowed smoke into the sky.

The musketry had fused into a single, sustained crackle. Screams punctuated it. The smell of rotten eggs, powder smoke stench, came over the courtyard. Palmer saw Fytch struck, saw him fall, imagined him dying. Blood, flowing from the lieutenant’s mouth, trickled to the firestep’s edge then, with obscene slowness, ran down the inner wall.

Palmer watched Harper’s group sprint across the courtyard, trampling the useless, burned abatis, and fire like men possessed into the darkness of the arch.

The fort stank of blood and smoke, the soldier’s smell.

Palmer, grateful that the coughing shells no longer fell into the fort, turned back towards the north. Gulls fought above the channel’s beach a quarter mile away. The rain seemed no closer. Beneath the diving, screaming gulls two men in a rowing boat planted fish traps of woven willow.

The noise and carnage at the Teste de Buch might have been a whole world away for all they seemed to care.

The sea was empty. Not one grey sail offered hope.